Appendix 4
Selecting An Athlete And Selecting A Coach
Any thinking person who seeks a high level of achievement in a given field endeavors to maximize his or her access to the resources that will improve the probability of achieving success. In athletics the most important resources are clearly human. Athletes look for the best coaches to guide them to successful performance. Similarly, successful coaches look for talented and dedicated athletes so that they can work with the best “material.” While it is entirely appropriate for athletes and coaches to seek the best people to work with, the quest to find the perfect coach or athlete can become an obsession. The athlete with such an obsession grimly pursues the coach who has the “secret” that will unlock the door to championship performance. Some coaches shamelessly woo the athlete who has the ability to make the coach a winner and prove that coach is as good as any other.
When the coach or athlete spends too much energy in this kind of search, it diverts the seeker’s attention from the crucial task at hand. In the case of the athlete, that task is proper training. For the coach that task is learning and developing the optimal training methods for his or her athletes.
Many coaches who focus on learning about the sport they coach and communicating what they have learned to their athletes realize that the greatest joy in coaching comes through such a process. These coaches derive their primary satisfaction in coaching from seeing their athletes progress rather than from the levels of performance that their athletes achieve. Other coaches are more focused on the trappings of success: the number of championships their athletes have won and the international teams they have made. There is certainly nothing wrong with striving to compile the most outstanding record ever achieved by a weightlifting coach. The inspiration that a coach can gain from such a goal may drive that coach to heroic efforts which benefit both him or her and the athletes with whom the coach works. But some coaches are so concerned with scoring high on external measures of success that winning at any cost becomes their primary focus. These coaches may go to great lengths to recruit athletes to their teams so that they can win championships. They may even resort to unfair practices to get the job done. There is little doubt that a great recruiter can often outperform a great coach in terms of championships won (though not in terms of satisfaction gained from coaching or the appreciation that athletes will show them for their work).
Recruiting makes it possible for a relatively mediocre coach to have a winning team and for a terrific coach to have a mediocre record when it comes to producing winning teams (particularly in an individual sport like weightlifting). This does not mean that a good coach will never produce good athletes, quite the contrary. A good coach will always produce his or her share of champions. Indeed, you cannot truly reach the highest level of coaching unless you have worked with some top athletes (because only advanced athletes present the challenges that are needed to hone coaching skills to the ultimate degree). However, the good coach will not rely on recruiting for his or her success, but, rather, will focus on perfecting his or her skills and maximizing the performance of his or her athletes.
Athlete Selection
Different coaches apply different approaches to athlete selection. Some coaches go after the “finished product,” attempting to induce champions to join their clubs. In other cases recruiting takes place on the beginner level. Here the coach relies on various techniques of screening to identify athletes who are believed to have the greatest potential to become champions. Screening or selection of athletes has been virtually automatic for many years in sports that are popular among athletes. In these sports the coach has many more athletes who wish to be a member of the team than he or she can coach or use to field a team. The coach therefore selects from the athletes who are interested those who appear to have the greatest potential for success.
In sports that rely heavily on natural ability, such as sprinting and jumping, athletes who do not show any special aptitude for the sport at the outset are simply not going to reach a high level. For instance, speed can only be improved to a very limited degree by training. If an athlete does not display at least good running speed at the outset, he or she will not become a champion sprinter.
Coaches who are involved with sports in which developed qualities are the key to success have a much harder time selecting athletes on the basis of their inherent capabilities. How does one determine an athlete’s ability to be a marathoner or a champion bodybuilder by examining an untrained person? Training plays a huge role in the success of athletes in these sports. While a naturally muscular person with a high percentage of fast-twitch muscle fibers will have an edge in bodybuilding and a naturally lean person with a high percentage of slow-twitch muscle fibers may have an advantage in marathoning, so much is determined by the training that such athletes do and their reaction to that training that predictions of success at the outset are virtually impossible. Relatively skinny beginners have blossomed into Mr. and Ms. Americas, while relatively stocky athletes have become successful distance runners.
Success in weightlifting depends far more on training than it does on natural talents. I have seen athletes start their careers physically strong and then improve their strength very little. I have seen other athletes begin their careers in a weak and emaciated state and then go on to become champions. I have seen athletes who were flexible and grasped the way in which the lifts are to be performed almost as soon as they were shown the technique of the classic lifts who went on to be mediocre technicians. Other athletes who had flexibility limitations that prevented them from achieving correct positions at the outset, and/or who seemed entirely uncoordinated when they tried to perform the lifts for the first time, have gone on to become excellent technicians. Because of the vital role that desire and proper training play in an athlete’s progress in weightlifting, it is hard to predict an athlete’s future success on the basis of his or her beginnings. Predictions of an athlete’s success in weightlifting are particularly difficult because success depends on so many qualities (e.g.., strength, power, speed, flexibility, skill and determination). Any effective selector of weightlifters would therefore need to assess an athlete’s present ability and potential for future progress in each of these areas, something no one has been able to do to date.
Why have the selectors experienced such difficulty? The primary reason is that there are several major problems with the concept of screening tests. The first problem is that “tests test what tests test.” While scientists and coaches (and other people involved in choosing who is most likely to be successful in a certain role) have probably been developing tests for a wide variety of general human capabilities for thousands of years, the vast majority of such tests have been found to be extremely specific. Performance on one test has little or no correspondence with another test that supposedly measures the same quality.
For example, in the psychological realm, there are no truly effective general intelligence tests. I.Q. tests test specific verbal and mathematical skills that are used in academic environments. Such tests may indeed be good indicators of academic success, but they do not fully or directly assess intelligence (let alone define it).
Similarly, there are no general tests that can predict skill, strength or flexibility in any area of the body that is not tested. Even the areas of the body that are tested can only be tested very specifically (e.g., a test that requires concentric contraction of the muscles measures their concentric capacity but does not do a great job of measuring their eccentric capacity). Even if the selector could predict whether the athlete could ultimately perform at a high level in each of these areas, few athletes would score consistently on most of them. Even those who appeared to have better overall physical potential would still present the single biggest unknowns to the selector: will the athlete put 100% effort into becoming a champion, and will he or she remain in the sport long enough to reach his or her potential?.
The second problem with selection tests is that no test can measure the single biggest factor in an athlete’s success: desire. Sports history is filled with stories of athletes with modest beginnings who went on to become champions. In Bulgaria World Champions and world record holders Yanko Rusev, Naim Suleymanoglu (then of Bulgaria) and Antonio Krastev all fared relatively poorly on the standard tests that Bulgarians use to select athletes. Antonio once told me, “I can’t jump from the floor onto a low desk, but I can move under a snatch very fast.” And so he can.
Had the testers been given ultimate power, the world might have been deprived of one of the greatest clean and jerkers that it has ever seen (Rusev), the man who snatched the heaviest weight ever accepted as a world record in the sport of weightlifting (Krastev) or one of the greatest weightlifters ever to grace the weightlifting platform (Suleymanoglu). If these athletes had believed the testers, surely they would never have achieved the successes that they did. While those who support selection will argue that there are motivational advantages to telling a lifter that he or she has talent, they overlook the devastating effects of telling an athlete he or she has no talent, particularly when the grounds for making such a statement are shaky at best.
If their lack of reliability regarding what they claim to test and their failure to measure the most important factor in weightlifting success are not enough to discourage selection, the realities of modern weightlifting should suffice. In the United States, and probably soon in the rest of the world, the issue of selecting an athlete is no longer a major one. Selection implies the ability and desire to choose from among options. In the United States we generally do not have the luxury of choosing our athletes. Rather, they choose weightlifting, and we are happy to have them because they do.
Most coaches who truly love weightlifting for weightlifting’s sake do not have any great desire to choose athletes. They are coaching because they love the sport and wish to help others discover its wonderful virtues, not solely because they want to produce champions. Most coaches are truly motivated by the desire to help an athlete be the best he or she can be. That, after all, is the ultimate challenge and the ultimate satisfaction in weightlifting and in life.
One last point with respect to athlete selection needs to be made. It pertains to the total misuse of the process. Most coaches who employ testing may legitimately think that such a process saves them and prospective athletes a great deal of time and energy. Unfortunately, a small number of coaches (usually inexperienced ones who claim to possess a great deal more knowledge than they do) is preoccupied with the issue of selection. This preoccupation may be an indirect expression of a lack of confidence in their skills. To protect their egos, these coaches have convinced themselves that there is no difference between coaches, that all are equally impotent in their ability to build champions and that all coaches rely on the roll of the dice for selection. If talented athletes come to them, they will be successful; if not, they will be doomed to an unrewarded struggle. Unfortunately these beliefs often rub off on their athletes.
Coach Selection
The selection of a coach is a topic that has rarely, if ever, been covered in a text on weightlifting, yet in many ways it is a much more appropriate subject for consideration than the selection of athletes. The athlete always has the option of coaching himself or herself if the availability of high quality coaching in his or her geographic area is poor. Therefore, the athlete always has a choice (even if it is not to use a local coach or to use no coach at all).
There are two main sets of criteria in evaluating a coach. One set is objective and the other is subjective. When using objective criteria, the athlete merely evaluates whether the coach has the full range and necessary depth of coaching skills to take that athlete to the level he or she wishes to achieve. If not, the athlete may not be able to rely on that coach alone to achieve his or her objectives. This is not a condemnation of that coach; nor does it mean that that particular coach should not be accepted. All coaches have areas in which they are weaker than others.
The purpose of the athlete’s judging the coach in this way is to understand the nature and extent of the coach’s strengths and weaknesses. Then the athlete can find a way to compensate for the coach’s deficiencies. This can be done through supplementary coaching advice, by helping the coach to improve and/or self coaching in the areas in which the coach is deficient.
Subjective issues can lead to intractable clashes with the athlete even though they do not necessarily reflect a weakness on the part of the coach. For example, if a coach regularly criticizes an athlete and, at least in the athlete’s view, rarely employs positive feedback, the athlete may find the experience of working with that coach to be a negative one overall, even if the coach possesses considerable technical skill. In contrast, the same coach may be perceived by another athlete as constantly presenting challenges. The relationship that such an athlete finds with such a coach can be very positive. A reserved athlete may be uncomfortable with a bombastic coach, while an outgoing and emotional athlete may be uncomfortable with a coach who is quiet and low key. Often these differences in personality can be overlooked by both parties and a successful coach/athlete relationship can be formed in spite of them, but this is not always the case.
Obviously, the ideal situation is one in which a coach serves an athlete’s objective and subjective needs. When this is not possible, the athlete and coach may wish to subdivide responsibilities. For example, a give coach may have a good training facility and a good eye for technique problems. On the other hand, the coach may be weak in the areas of programming and motivating the athlete. In this situation the athlete may train with that coach and carefully heed the coach’s technical advice but ask another coach to write his or her training program. In addition, he or she may look to other athletes to provide encouragement and motivation in training. This kind of an arrangement has worked well for many athletes.
In another situation a coach may be wonderful in training but may not be at his or her best in competition. This coach may seek the help of other coaches at competitions but may perform all other coaching responsibilities.
How do you tell a good coach from a bad one? There are several things to consider. First, what kind of results has the coach gotten? Has the coach been successful in building champion athletes from day one? How many athletes has the coach brought from the beginning all the way along in their careers (coaches with large teams and/or very successful athletes may have actually coached the athletes they take credit for to a very limited extent)? What are the qualities of the lifters that coach has developed (excellent technique, performance consistency, healthy bodies)? Second, does the coach prescribe the same program for everyone and then put the athletes on autopilot, expecting them to perform the workout without deviation, regardless of results? Or does the coach individualize training programs for the needs of the athlete? Third, and least important, does the coach have some credentials in terms of education or coaching ranking conferred by some independent organization?
Having a formal education in some scientific area that is related to weightlifting (e.g., physiology of exercise or biomechanics) is useful, but the relationship between such knowledge and success as a coach is limited at best. Many credentials do not mean much, because they can be acquired in a number of ways. For example, the USAW has some international level coaches who are extremely knowledgeable and who have learned their trade through many years of unstinting effort in the gym. There are other coaches who have achieved such a level through the grandfathering of undocumented relationships with athletes and/or their availability to accompany athletes with whom they had no relationships on unimportant international trips. In contrast, there are coaches who have consistently developed some of the best athletes in the country who have never achieved the international ranking because of some formality that they have never gone through with the USAW.
This is not meant to be a criticism of the USAW, which has done many good things to foster the development of good coaches. Rather, it merely demonstrates that most ranking, credentialing and licensing systems are flawed and that they cannot be relied upon as the sole or even primary consideration when selecting a coach, a physician or any other professional.
Summary
In closing, it should be noted that while there is nothing wrong with athletes selecting coaches or coaches selecting athletes, both parties must realize that weightlifters and weightlifting coaches are both rare commodities in the United States. Moreover, most lifters and coaches are involved in weightlifting because they love the sport, and they are working to the best of their ability and in good faith. Therefore, we all should be careful about criticizing the abilities of any coach or athlete of good character and should welcome participants in either activity with open arms. Finally, athletes who change coaches should always remember the time and effort expended on their behalf by any coach who has helped them, or even honestly tried to do so; athletes should always be grateful for that help.